On May 26, 2004, a peace deal was signed between the Sudanese government in Khartoum and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, and a 20-year civil war was thus ended. The pact incorporated two earlier agreements on the constitutional future of the south and the allocation of oil revenues between the north and the south, as well as agreement on the nature of power sharing in the central government and on setting up a 39,000-strong army.

The satisfaction that came from forging an agreement, however, was quickly overshadowed by events in the western province of Darfur, which was not included in the deal. With most of its troops engaged in the war in the south, the government had enlisted and armed Arab militias to quell the revolt of black subsistence farmers that had begun in February 2003. As a result, more than a million black civilians were forced to seek safety in refugee camps, and an estimated 70,000 others had been killed or had died as a result of disease and/or hardship. Aid agencies complained that obstacles were impeding their access to the camps, but the government insisted that it was committed to securing a just and peaceful settlement of the conflict. On April 8, under the auspices of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the Sudanese government and two rebel groups agreed to a cease-fire, but it was ignored.

Senior diplomats from the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and France visited Khartoum and urged the government to take action to curb the militias and what some had referred to as genocide, but their pleas only strengthened the government’s resistance to foreign intervention. Successive resolutions by the UN Security Council on June 11, on July 30, and again in mid-September, threatening action if the government did not call a halt to the conflict, produced little result and were seriously weakened by the abstentions of China, Pakistan, Russia, and Algeria. In September China, which had invested millions of dollars in the development of The Sudan’s oil resources, threatened to veto any resolutions seeking to impose sanctions on the oil industry.

In August the Sudanese government accepted the deployment in Darfur of 300 troops offered by the African Union (AU) to protect observers and aid workers. The AU also called on the government to arrest those responsible for the violence. Talks between the opposing parties, which began in mid-August in Abuja, Nigeria, broke down after three weeks but were resumed in October, with the AU serving as mediator; nonetheless, fighting continued between the government and the rebels in Darfur despite repeated efforts to reach an agreement. The AU also offered 3,000 more troops to be deployed as peacekeepers, but only 800 of them had been deployed by mid-December.